TrumpetBoy

I was pleased to find the other day that the fine folks over at Mozilla have put out a Preview Release of the Firefox 1.0 web browser. This is good news as it means that very shortly there will be a fully-featured and stable version of this great software available to the world at large. I started using Firefox back in May 2004 while building AWFulMusic.net for my friend, and former College tutor, Tony Faulkner. Tony told me about this great browser he’d found and although sceptical at first, I went off and discovered it for myself. More about that shortly, but first to clarify…
Many people (or indeed both of you who may actually read this) will be asking why I would need a new browser in the first place? After all, what’s wrong with Microsoft Internet Explorer? That question in itself would be worthy of a lengthy post here but enough people have already delivered their diatribes on the subject elsewhere on the web. Try visiting the Browse Happy website and see what they have to say about it.
My main hangup with IE is it’s dodgy interpretation of CSS code. For the uninitiated, that controls the way modern web pages look in terms of layout and text styles etc. Most of the languages of the web have specifications set out by the W3C and while many browsers adhere to these rules, Microsoft often chooses to take it’s own "easy way out" rather than making IE follow the rules correctly. That makes the job of the Web coder more difficult because we have to employ various workarounds to get pages to look right in IE as well as everything else (Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Safari etc). This is made more irritating by the fact that it’s a necessary evil because about half of web users today, surf with Internet Explorer. Aside from the technical side of things, there are also so many security issues that go along with using IE that it really is advisable to avoid it.
Anyway, back to Firefox….
I had previously been dissatisfied with other Gecko-based browsers like Netscape 7 and Mozilla for various reasons which mainly boiled down to how used I was to using IE. Suddenly here was a revelation - a browser that rendered code in the same correct way as those browsers but retained more of the feel of IE as well as adding some really useful extensions to generally improve the computing experience as a whole. A favourite is the function to import all of your IE bookmarks!! I started with version 0.8 of Firefox and have religiously upgraded my way through the ensuing months until the current 1.0PR version. I would heartily recommend that everyone tries this great program out. To do so couldn’t be simpler - visit GetFirefox.com and download the setup file. It’s only 4.6MB which shouldn’t take more than about 10mins on a 56K dial-up connection. It may be the best computer decision you ever make - particularly since this website will work slightly better in it!!